Holiday Gift Guide 2012

Box sets, books, DVDs, and more-- gift ideas for the music lover on your list.

With that time of year upon us once again, we've put together a collection of ideas for holiday gifts that music fans would enjoy. Some are expensive, some are cheap; some are built to last, others perhaps not so much. There are books, box sets, DVDs, gadgets, a Lil B-inspired t-shirt, hip-hop pillows, punk tomes, gig posters, label histories, ambient bliss, and much more.

David Byrne's How Music Works isn't quite a rockstar memoir, though it is rich with Byrne arcana and Talking Heads history. Instead, the handsome, McSweeney's-published volume of essays (cover design by Dave Eggers, natch) is a loving record of Byrne's gently insistent brand of musical curiosity, and all the places it has led him. Each essay explores a large idea about music-- how it is invisibly molded by its recording medium, for example, or how it changes according to the demands of live performance-- and Byrne, with his itinerant interests and ever-changing cast of collaborators, is merely a character in these in explorations. The book also works for fellow Byrne-ian eggheads, wondering about, say, the influence of kabuki theater on rock spectacles, as it does for people who just want to know where Byrne got the idea for that big funny white suit on the Stop Making Sense tour. True to its title, How Music Works is written in a tone of simple eloquence and wonder that is so charming that one imagines Byrne could use it to teach astrophysics to kindergarteners. --Jayson Greene

I like to visit Rookie, Tavi Gevinson's web magazine for teenage girls, for a daily reminder of how pathetically unrealized an adult human woman I must be. As a teenager, I listened to Razorlight and read less-than-feminist novels like The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. But these young dames can quote Joan Didion off the tops of their heads and they listen to Joni Mitchell albums that aren'tBlue! Jokes aside: Gevinson has teamed with comics publisher Drawn and Quarterly to compile Rookie's first year of articles on self-actualization in all its messy forms into a beautifully designed, meaty yearbook; Rookie itself has self-actualized, if you like.

Perhaps you no longer need advice on how to make it look like you definitelywere not crying five minutes ago, but Yearbook One's obsessively detailed interviews with artists like Sky Ferreira, First Aid Kit, Daniel Clowes, and David Sedaris are the stuff of delight, without age restrictions. And we'd all do well to remember what seems to be its main message: "Don't like the culture that's around you? Then change it!" If you're shy about getting it for yourself, surprise a younger relative this holiday season. And then, when they borrow your record player to spin the Dum Dum Girls/Supercute flexi-disc hidden between the pages, you can take a swift flick through the book and realize there's no need to be shy about enjoying it. --Laura Snapes

For all that Lil B puts out into this world-- a constant stream of positive thinking and hilarity, hundreds of songs a year, endless fodder for memes, YouTube channels, imitators-- he really doesn't offer much you can actually grasp in your hands, or pay money for, for that matter. And it's not as though you can tell your mother: "To commemorate the sixth night of Hanukkah I've downloaded the entire Flame series for you." Instead, to shop for the Based God loyalist in your life, you'll have to turn to third-party vendors of mass-produced, crowd-sourced merchandise like Zazzle. The cream of the crop is the above pop-art/comic book interpretation of the "Thank You Based God" meme in black or white t-shirt form. It's more charming and more rare than your standard artist merch, and gives any Lil B fan a conversation-sparking way to express his or her most Based gratitude. --Carrie Battan

A $55 coffee-table tome on punk's aesthetic history sounds like just about the least punk thing in the world. But anyone who's perennially lived on the receiving end of holiday-time books on punk and bohemia could attest that Punk: An Aesthetic is worthwhile; unsurprising, considering it's a production of England's Dreaming author/punk scholar Jon Savage and writer/archivist Johan Kugelberg. Aesthetic doesn't assign a straight '78-to-present narrative to the birth or trajectory of "punk," but rather allows 352-pages of photographs and assorted artifacts to speak for themselves. In Kugelberg's opening essay-- one of three, plus a preface by Crass visual artist Gee Vaucher-- he denounces an authentic punk past, intent on inspiring DIY communication today: "It's cool to do things on your own," Kugelberg writes. "It is life-affirming to 'get' and embrace matters that most others don't."

This collection offers great nuance to punk since the 60s: fashion photos of Circle Jerks fans or Blondie members wearing McLaren/Westwood designs, anarchist posters and various cartoons, Exploding Plastic Inevitable handbills, and flyers for $1 Suicide gigs. Myriad magazine reprints are included-- a 1977 Art Ride guest-edited by Alan Vega, for example-- as well as early PR materials for the Fugs and the Ramones. But the most fascinating artifacts are also the most simple, like an "anonymous" Xerox of Johnny Rotten's face with a caption scrawled on; these sorts of images make the cool language of pioneering punk feel accessible, a reminder that tangible underground culture is still possible if you can suppress the ones and zeroes of 2012. As Vaucher writes, "It is creative suicide to point outside ourselves and accuse the world of failing us if we cannot make ourselves heard." And this book makes you believe it. --Jenn Pelly

Frida Clements routinely receives emails from young women asking for advice on getting into gig poster design. "A lot of the work I do looks cool, but there's not a lot of money in designing for music," the Seattleartist tells them. "Visual artists are probably at the very bottom of the food chain in the music industry. And women doing this are few and far between." She then encourages the aspirants to work hard anyway, but she's right: rock poster art has long been the domain of dudes-- thus the decades of grinning skulls and bodacious babes.

Clements' screen prints in muted shades of blue and chestnut and ochre, would look awesome on any music fan's walls, especially if they're averse to pinups and horror comics. A Spoon poster, graceful with chandeliers and pianos, is as spare and stylized as the Austin rockers. With its ironic depiction of mid-century modern domesticity, Clements' design for the famously intimate sounding XX, puts a new spin on the word. But lest it sound like her work is overly decorative, consider the artist's poster for Sharon Van Etten: a woman stands in silhouette against a window, her heel crushing the head of a snake spewing blood. Frida Clements' posters are available in her Etsy and Big Cartel shops and are priced between $15 and $30. --Amy Granzin

How can one possibly doubt the economic health of Europe when there's apparently a financially solvent Swedish company that makes cushions modeled after your favorite Roland beatmakers? Drum machines may have no soul, but they can really tie a room together-- the TR-303, 808, and 909 Producer Pack will prove every bit as entertaining to both stoned buddies and bored babies occupying your couch, who will surely press the "buttons" thinking they'll be cranking out the next "Posse On Broadway" in no time. Or, perhaps it's worth the approximately 295 U.S. dollars (plus shipping) to see 808s and Heartbreak rendered as a physical reality with the full-size TR-808 beanbag, a perfect impromptu resting place if your partner kicks you out of bed for bumping too much vintage Too $hort. --Ian Cohen

The Disintegration Loops box set, which collects the four volumes of William Basinski's ambient masterpiece, is one of those packages where you probably have a good idea of whether or not you need it in your life. It's not cheap, and it contains an exhaustive amount of something very specific-- nine LPs, 5 CDs, a DVD, and a book. It's heavy-- next time you're loading the truck for a move, this box might warrant its own trip. That kind of heavy. But if you are the sort of person who feels strongly about this project, I can report that every aspect of it is of the utmost quality. Sturdy vinyl, thick cardboard, beautiful print, and striking overall design. --Mark Richardson

Over the past few years, crafty types have built docking stations from logs, embedded iPod speakers in vintage luggage, and sewn iPhone cases from old sweaters, laminated maps, and recycled shopping bags. As soon as cool, sterile, modern, digital players became de rigueur, people started looking for ways to make them warm, homey, and familiar again.

At first blush, Ryan Boase's gramophone speakers seem like just another good idea for repurposing obsolete objects. Except that ReAcoustic's iPod/iPhone/iPad docking stations amplify sound the way the original artifacts did-- acoustically. There's no power cord, no batteries, nothing but your digital device and a mono metal horn that will render Passion Pit old-timey and Kendrick Lamar winsome. Not incidentally, ReAcoustic's speakers are also works of dada-esque art-- elegantblack commas andcoppery mutant blooms growing from stained-wood bases. Depending on the style, speakers are ready to ship or made to order and cost between $170 and $600. --Amy Granzin

Just the words "Columbia Records" can pop an image into a music fan's head: that red circular label with the black text at the center of the LP, with the "eye" logo accompanying it. The label is as recognizable a brand as American industry has ever produced, and on the occasion of its 125th birthday this year comes historian Sean Wilentz's magisterial 360 Sound, which traces the label's story from wax cylinders to mp3s. Wilentz has published acclaimed books on several American Presidents, but his pop bonafides were established in 2010 as he traced the career of Columbia's most celebrated artist-- Bob Dylan first appears a bit more than halfway through 360 Sound, via a striking 12" x 8" photo of the young folk singer on the verge of stardom, having recently been signed to the label by legendary Columbia A&R man John Hammond, "chiefly due to his skillful harmonica playing." When Hammond met Dylan in 1961, Columbia was already getting ready to turn 75, and like most septuagenarians of the time, was notoriously slow to warm to the youth-oriented trend of rock'n'roll music.

Wilentz's story of the label's formative years, told through effortless prose (including several sidebars by critic Dave Marsh), striking photographs, and images of the label's promotional materials, is very much the tale of a fledgling nation simultaneously coming to terms with the stain of slavery while developing into an industrial and consumerist superpower. In 1911, they signed Al Jolson, the most notorious (and talented) of the blackface minstrels. When the rise of free music on radio threatened profits a couple decades later, Columbia responded by diversifying its ever-expanding roster of jazz and classical artists into the nascent genres of blues and "hillbilly" music. Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Johnny Cash, Bob Wills, Miles Davis, and Dave Brubeck all had direct ties to the powerhouse label.

Wilentz's story is one of technological development as well. During the early-century format wars, Columbia pioneered the two-sided disc, then, during its sales wars with Victor, unsuccessfully tried to merge with Thomas Edison's National Phonograph in 1910 (the cranky inventor wasn't too fond of "recorded music"). The development of electrical microphones led to Columbia crooners Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra redefining the nature of pop intimacy. In the 50s, the label's graphic designer Alex Steinweiss is credited as one of the forefathers of album art, which coincided with Columbia's development of the long-playing 12" 33 1/3 rpm format, leading to the astounding chart dominance of Broadway original cast albums. As the 70s give way to the 80s, 90s, and the 21st century, Wilentz traces a story of aggressive mergers and divestitures, global markets, and the rise and fall of MTV and the compact disc. By the time he gets to the contested contemporary format wars of mp3s and Spotify-- not to mention Mariah, Beyoncé, and "Glee"-- the continuities with Columbia's own history come into focus as the book's greatest feature. --Eric Harvey